Sunday, 20 November 2016

Storms play an important role in a number of Shakespeare’s
plays such as Macbeth and Julius Caesar, where they are harbingers
of cataclysmic events, but he also uses them to bring twists to his plots – in Pericles, not once by twice. While in
his last play, The Tempest, said to have
been inspired by the real life adventure of the sailors who discovered Bermuda,
a storm provides a way of plunging characters into a strange new world.

My new book Storm: Nature and Culture tells the story of the role
played by storms in literature, as well as examining their place in art, films,
religion and history.

One of the earliest uses in a novel of their ability to transport
characters into a new world came from Daniel Defoe in his famous book from
1719, Robinson Crusoe, in which a
shipwreck maroons the hero on a deserted island for 28 years. Defoe,
incidentally, also wrote an account of England’s greatest ever storm in 1703.

In more recent literary storms, Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie (2011) sees a boy
becoming one of a handful of survivors from a ship’s encounter with a
waterspout – a marine tornado - and having to kill and eat his best friend,
while in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001),
another boy finds himself sharing a lifeboat with a hungry tiger.

There is much more on storms in literature in Storm: Nature and Culture published by Reaktion Books. Price
£14.95. ISBN 9781780236612

Friday, 18 November 2016

A
service of remembrance is being held today at Thiepval in northern France to
commemorate the last day of the Battle of the Somme. (Though the historian Martin
Gilbert in his Somme: The Heroism and
Horror of War, puts the final action on November 19.) Thiepval’s Memorial
to the Missing lists the names of more than 72,000 soldiers whose bodies were never
found.

I
wrote about the Somme in my book Britain’s
20 Worst Military Disasters, noting that every other battle I featured was clearly
a defeat, while the Somme is sometimes seen as a victory.

The
ground gained was negligible. Nowhere did the Allied line advance more than six
miles, and many objectives due to be taken on the first day were never
captured, nor did the Allies liberate a single town or gain a single
strategically significant point. But it is said that the bloody attrition
fatally drained German resources and paved the way for the Allied victory two
years later.

The
offensive involving British, British Empire and French soldiers had begun on 1
July, 1916. By the end of that day, nearly 20,000 British soldiers were dead,
and 36,000 wounded – the worst toll for a single day in the history of the
British Army.

When
rotten weather and cloying mud finally brought an end to the battle, Britain and the British Empire had suffered an almost
unimaginable 400,000 casualties, the French had lost about 200,000, and the
Germans perhaps 450,000.

Thursday, 17 November 2016

On Thursday, 10 August 1893, about
an inch and a quarter of rain fell on Preston in Lancashire in five minutes. This
remains a record for the UK. It was the result of what that day’s Lancashire Daily Post described as a
‘terrific thunderstorm’.

The rain was so heavy you could not
see across the main street, parts of the town was flooded to a depth of two feet, and a
horse was reportedly drowned, while there were also said to be hailstones ‘as
big as pigeon’s eggs’.

Surreally in the midst of this
water, water everywhere, a wholesale greengrocer’s was set on fire when it was
struck by lightning. Lancashire also holds other British rainfall records. The
most to fall in 15 minutes was 2.2 inches at Bolton Hall in July 1964, and the
most in 90 minutes was 4.6 inches at Dunsop Valley in August 1967.

As far as world records go, an inch
and a half of rain came down in just one minute on Guadeloupe in 1970, while
the island of Reunion (pictured) was subjected to an astonishing 71 and ¾ inches in 24
hours in 1966.

Wednesday, 16 November 2016

Here's an interview I did for BBC Radio Cornwall with Debbie McCrory on Monday about my new book: 'Storm: Nature and Culture' (Reaktion Books)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOornZKVbIMOr you can listen to it on this BBC link (it starts about 01 33 00)http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04czmwh#play

Sunday, 13 November 2016

Investigators are still trying to
establish the causes of this week’s tram derailment in Croydon to the south of
London, which killed 7 people and injured more than 50 others. Trams are
generally a very safe form of transport but this accident has led to calls for
improved safety measures such as automatic braking systems of the kind used on
trains.

Probably the deadliest tram
accident in history happened on the foggy morning of 12 July 1930 in Buenos
Aires. Service 105 was on its way from the city of Lanus, south of Buenos
Aires, to the Constitución station in the Argentinian capital. The driver had been
with the tram company for only about two months.

On its journey the vehicle had to
cross a bridge over the Riachuelo river. As it approached, the bridge had been
lifted to allow a vessel to pass beneath, but the driver did not see the red
light warning him not to proceed.

By the time the driver realised the
bridge was up, it was too late. He tried to apply the brake, but the tram
plunged into the water. The driver was one of the 56 people who lost their
lives. Only 7 survived.

Saturday, 12 November 2016

In ancient religions all over the
world – Greece, Rome, Iceland, India – the chief god was the god of storms,
whether it was Zeus brandishing his thunderbolt, Thor with his magic hammer, or
Indra riding his multi-tusked elephant.

My new book Storm: Nature and Culture (Reaktion) explores the fascinating
stories surrounding these gods, such as how a wicked giant stole Thor’s hammer
and demanded the hand of a princess in marriage as the price of its return.
Thor disguised himself as the bride, and managed to escape detection at the
wedding ceremony in spite of eating an ox and eight salmon. Then he grabbed the
hammer and killed the giant.

The Maoris told of how the sky god
made love endlessly to the earth goddess so their children could never get out
of her womb. Eventually one of the young deities managed to prise them apart, but
this upset the storm god Tawhirimatea who had been quite happy inside his
mother, and now became an unruly presence on land and sea.

In some Slavic regions, they
believed the darkness held the sun prisoner in a cell which could be opened
only by lightning from the storm god, Perun, and a spring festival used to be
held at which maidens would dance themselves to death in his honour. This
became the inspiration for Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, while the cult 1970s British horror film, The Wicker Man, was inspired by
sacrifices to the Celtic storm god, Taranis.

For much more on the role of storms in religion, see Storm: Nature and
Culture by John Withington. Reaktion Books. Price £14.95. ISBN 9781780236612.

Thursday, 3 November 2016

In 1517, resentment against people from the rest of
Europe swept through London. They were supposed to be buying up all the food in
the markets, a Frenchman had bullied a shopkeeper into selling him two pigeons,
competition from German merchants importing furniture and leather goods was
ruining local tradesmen, the Venetians were using their own galleys to bring in
goods, depriving English shipowners of work, and so on and so on.

A vicar at Spitalfields denounced these interlopers from his
pulpit, urging Londoners to expel them. On April 30, the London mob rioted,
with thousands attacking any foreigner they could lay their hands on and burning
their houses. The disorder continued into what became known as ‘Evil May Day,’
with the French ambassador having to flee his house and hide.

Henry VIII was at Richmond when the news reached him. He
knew that, whatever the mob felt, foreign merchants were crucial to London’s
prosperity, so he ordered the Duke of Norfolk to gather a force of 2,000 men
and march on the capital without delay.

By evening, the duke was in the city. He quickly suppressed the
disorder and arrested several hundred rioters. Many were charged with high
treason, for stirring up hostility against states with which the king was at
peace. More than a dozen were executed.

About Me

Author of 'Storm: Nature and Culture', 'Flood: Nature and Culture','Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters','London's Disasters','The Disastrous History of London' ('Capital Disasters' in hardback), 'A Disastrous History of Britain', 'A Disastrous History of the World', 'Disaster! A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues and Other Catastrophes', and 'Shutdown. Anatomy of a Shipyard Closure.' Producer/director of more
than 40 tv documentaries. Former radio producer. Freelance writer for publications such as the Guardian, Independent, Daily Express, Observer, New Statatesman. Freelance communications consultant and adviser. http://www.disasterhistorian.com/